BAC350 - Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements (14 hrs)
Course Description
Our failure to understand users’ requirements is the most common source of project defects, delays and cancellations. The accumulating evidence is unequivocal: most serious problems associated with projects are related directly to requirements. Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements attacks the problem of project failures by addressing their root causes: incomplete, poorly defined, and/or changing requirements.
This two-day course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for gathering requirements. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements, and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle. If you participate in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can’t afford to miss this course!
Course Outline
- The Business Case for Requirements Engineering
- Foundations of Requirements Development
- Project Initiation
- Eliciting Functional and Non-functional requirements
- Use Cases: A First Look
- Reviewing and Refining Requirements
- Creating a Requirements Specification
Learner Outcomes
At the end of this course, the learner will be able to:
- Improve tools and techniques for gathering and developing more precise requirements
- Increase customers’ satisfaction by determining and understanding their true needs
- Prevent errors in specifications by defining project scope up front
- Identify the key players and learn to communicate effectively with them
- Learn how to collect and use metrics so you can plan better
- Lower development/maintenance costs by designing cost-effective processes
- Understand how to plan and manage the software development life cycle more effectively
- Develop templates and checklists that work
- Save money by reducing and managing ever-present scope creep
- Improve business analysis techniques to reduce project cost
Notes
Learn about more business analysis topics here.Recommendations
Target Audience:
- Business Customer or Partner who wants to work more effectively with IT colleagues to identify project requirements for solving business problems
- Business Analyst who needs to define or gather users' business requirements
- Business Systems Analyst who wants to understand user's business requirements, translate them into clear statements of functional and system requirements and add value to IT projects
- Systems Analyst who must develop correct technical specifications from functional and system requirements
- Designer or Developer who desires to produce a high-quality system from the functional and systems requirements
- Project Manager or Team Leader who must ensure that IT project team members correctly understand customer needs and deliver high quality solutions within project constraints.
Testimonials
"I would recommend this course due to the instructor's energy and skill at relating the class to relevant business processes."
Fall 2019 Participant
"The instructor is great at keeping the class engaged, as I realize this can be difficult at times."
Fall 2019 Participant
"The instructor is very knowledge about the topic and it's very helpful when they share their personal experience with the topics."
Fall 2019 Participant